[DRMacIver]

Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased:

Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him."

Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?"

Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news."

Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?"

Will: "No, probably not."

(Which is to say: You're entirely right. But we thought the name was funny so we kept it. Sorry for the philosophical inaccuracy)

[wwilson]

If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."

One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.

[1-more]

A sort of broadening of Cunningham's Law (the fastest way to get an answer online is not by posting the question, but by posting the wrong answer—very true in my experience). If there's no issue of fact at hand, then you end up getting some engagement about the intentional malapropism/misattribution/mistake/whatever and then the forum rules tend to herd participants back to discussing the matter at hand: your company.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

[jpadkins]

Seth Godin made the case that its more important for people to make remarks than to be favorable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Bus...)

Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal immigration, tariffs, or whatever subject Trump thought was to their advantage.

[amalcon]

"No such thing as bad publicity" is a very old idea. That quote is usually attributed to PT Barnum, but the idea is much older than him.

[comicjk]

People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.

[dfabulich]

If that's not motivation enough for you to rename it, well, TypeScript already has a static type checker called Hegel. https://hegel.js.org/ (It's a stronger type system than TypeScript.)

[DRMacIver]

We looked at it and given that the repo was archived nearly two years ago decided it wasn't a problem.

[cmrdporcupine]

I think it's more that Hegel was fine with "dialectics" but that the antithesis/synthesis stuff is not actually what's going on in his dialectic. It's a bit of a popular misconception about the role of negation and "movement" in Hegel.

I believe (unless my memory is broken) they get into this a bunch in Ep 15 of my favourite podcast "What's Left Of Philosophy": https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/15-what-is-dialectics-...

Also if you're not being complained about on HN, are you even really nerd-ing?